Outdoor lawn and patio furniture is frequently manufactured with an articulateed tubular aluminum frame to provide a lightweight, foldable, and readily transportable chair for relaxing on a beach, patio, lawn or in a similar environment. The persons using these articles of furniture usually do not have the indoor luxury of a nearby coffee table, stand or other elevated platform for the placement of small personal articles, beverage containers or the like.
Various devices have attempted to provide auxiliary supports including supports attachable to articles of furniture. Typical among those devices are holders that relied upon a clamp secured to a leg of a chair, as for example was shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,021,106, 4,063,701 and 4,256,281. Those attachments, as noted, usually required a tool for their installation and necessitated the time-consuming removal and disassembly when the chair was folded for transport or storage. This presented a distinct inconvenience and disadvantage.
Other devices incorported integral support surfaces within the armrest of the chair or otherwise provided for extensions of the arm support such as typically shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,233,940, 4,003,598, 3,329,272 and 4,548,326. The construction of those devices had inherent limitations and restricted use of the arm support. Furthermore,those support arrangements, located relatively high on the chair, did not provide cup stability and inadvertent arm movement could tip over beverage containers mounted at armrest level.
Another problem of previous beverage container supports, especially those supports located below the chair armrest was that they relied upon a ringed cup-holding member as exemplified by the apparatus of U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,021,106 and Des. 226,623. A shortcoming of those supports was that the beverage container required gripping at the upper portion when lifted. Otherwise, the lifting necessitated the use of two hands for the reason that the container-gripping hand could not pass over the ringed member. In supports without a ringed cup-holding member, recessed areas were required for cup confinement, such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,560,128. The paper cup, however, had to be gripped along a top margin for removal. The lifting of a laden paper cup, along the upper portion or the margin of the lip was not preferred as this was the structurally weakest portion of the cup, and given to deformation, especially when stubbornly held by the cup-holding member. Therefore, a deficiency of those supports was that the container could not be conveniently or securely removed.